University of La Verne: A Different Kind of Misleading Advertising

The University of La Verne Law School (located in Ontario, California, and yes, I had to look it up, too) is trying again to bump it's "provisional" ABA accreditation to full ABA accreditation. The ABA's decision on their accreditation was delayed last year after only 34% of the graduating class passed the California bar exam on the first try. The school received provisional status in 2006 and the timeline is 5 years, so some are concerned that its time will expire and it won't be accredited, although it appears things are getting slightly better:

The exam pass rate for the same 2009 group rose to 73percent after students who had done poorly the first time retook the exam. These rates are called "ultimate" pass rates, which are also evaluated by the ABA. The 2010 first-time bar passage rate for graduating students at the law school reached 53percent.

Matt Jones, a first-year student at the law school, is among some first- and second-year students concerned about not being able to take the multi-state bar exam if they graduate at a school without ABA approval. Jones has nonetheless expressed satisfaction with the education he's receiving at the school, but he said the situation is a potential mess for many graduating with as much as $140,000 in debt.

This is a valid concern, isn't it? If you go to a school that's only provisionally accredited, you have one set of rights, but how many 0L's honestly realize that provisional accreditation expires? How many honestly realize that enrolling in a provisional school and graduating from a non-accredited school is a risk to take into account? Is the school upfront about this possible scenario?

Let's ask the Dean.

"They were told as graduates of provisional schools they're entitled to take the bar in all 50 states," [Dean Allen] Easley said. "The harder question is how much detail has gone into conversations with individuals about what would happen if the school loses its provisional status before they graduate. That gets to a level of detail you're not going to get into every single conversation. Certainly if anyone were to ask what were to happen if the school lost provisional approval before graduation, they would get an accurate answer. ... I don't think that question always gets asked."

Law school is a major investment of capital. The entire premise of our federal investment laws are that individuals should be fully apprised of the risks of an investment, especially the risks that have high acquisition costs (like trying to figure out the ABA's rules on accreditation).

And yet, this law school - a six-figure investment over three years - apparently only tells people "an accurate answer" of what would happen if they lose provisional status in the rare event that that person actually asks the question. Such a situation is blatantly contrary to the last 80 years of revelations about investment regulation, and it's also seemingly counter to common law contract principles (e.g., duty to disclose latent home defects).

Personally, I don't think the ABA should be accrediting schools where only ~50% of the class passes the bar exam, but that's just me. I just think the school has a duty to be entirely up front about their accreditation status, including the chance that they'll lose provisional accreditation.

But don't worry, kids, Dean Easley has a plan in case the ABA bucks a trend and actually rejects the school:

If a denial occurs, Easley said the law school would initiate an expedited application process to regain provisional status. He said recent precedent placed that process at about eight months.

"I think there's a good chance (for approval)," Easley said. "I believe we meet all the standards, but it's not my decision. The council is charged with making that decision. I hope we will get full approval and I believe we should."

Well, Dean Easley, you may meet the ABA's standards, but you don't meet mine, and you certainly weren't meeting your duty to prospective students if you weren't being entirely up front in disclosing that the school may lose accreditation.

The New Normal; Can "Entreprenurial" Dayton Adjust?

Great article from Claire Zillman at AmericanLawyer.com:

After two years of turmoil, the nation's largest law firms are settling into a new normal.
...
"The loss of leverage is not a short-term reaction, it's a significant long-term change," says Bingham McCutchen chairman Jay Zimmerman. "We're hiring selectively and using paralegals and staff lawyers for more mundane tasks." He's not alone: A little more than half of our respondents (55 percent) said that their firm had used contract lawyers, up from 44 percent a year ago.

Moreover, few firm leaders worried that a smaller class size would leave them short-staffed in the event of a sudden uptick in work. With so many recent law school graduates looking for jobs, firms can staff up quickly if the need arises, says Perkins Coie managing partner Robert Giles.

However, the law schools continue admitting students by the thousands even when their most notable practitioners have full cognizance that there is a massive oversupply of labor, so much so that elite students no longer have leverage.

And yet law school administrators, charged with instilling ethics in the next generation of lawyers, continue to place a premium on advertising. For example, Dayton just hired SIU Law Professor Paul McGreal as its new dean. What drew him to Dayton?

"This is a law school that's been entrepreneurial in looking at curriculum and the recruitment of students."

"[E]ntrepreneurial in . . . the recruitment of students?" It's hard to tell what exactly Dayton is doing that is so "entrepreneurial" since it's attracting students with a median LSAT of 152. Perhaps it's in the slick marketing as evidenced in their 2010 Viewbook that drew McGreal's attention. Let's see some samples:


For those who cannot read the small type (or cannot avert their eyes from the egregiously-hilarious large type), on this second page Dayton boasts of having a 94% job placement rate for the class of 2008 within nine months of graduating and having 90% of graduates pass the bar on the first time.

This is curious, to me, because their 2005 numbers were only 85.4% employed and 81% bar passage. Given that the school obviously has no scruples with lying ("the world definitely needs more lawyers?" "Long hours in the law library" will make someone NOT want to call Dr. Kevorkian?), my healthy skepticism is running at full blast. Perhaps this link for the Class of 2007's data better explains why the school can claim 94%:

					Job Type
					Bar admission required or anticipated (e.g., attorney and corporate counsel positions, law clerks, judicial clerks)		83.0%
					J.D. preferred, law degree enhances position (e.g., corporate contracts administrator, alternative dispute resolution specialist, government regulatory analyst, FBI special agent)		11.0%
					Professional/other (jobs that require professional skills or training but for which a J.D. is neither preferred nor particularly applicable; e.g., accountant, teacher, business manager, nurse)		5.0%
					Nonprofessional/other (job that does not require any professional skills or training or is taken on a temporary basis and not viewed as part of a career path)		1.0%

Right. 2007 was before the "new normal" fully set in and 17% of your grads did not need a Juris Doctor. Tell me again why the world needs more lawyers, please. Tell me why I should invest 3 years in a field where the "new normal" means the labor supply is so grossly oversaturated that firms believe they can hire good talent quickly if they need to.


Ah, yes. Dayton, that city of my dreams. To think someone actually wrote these pages and didn't collapse, instantly dead of a laughter attack, is astounding.


I agree completely.

Dean McGreal, if the outright dishonesty at work here is what you call "entrepreneurial," I think you need to brush up on your ethics. This is a moral issue, and viewing prospective students the way large retailers view poor people with welfare checks is unethical behavior.

As the survey and article cited above point out, there is a "new normal" in the legal world. Telling your students or prospective students the old one will return is no more based in rationality than believing Santa Claus will show up with a bag o' jobs this Christmas. The world does not need more lawyers right now. It needs better lawyers, and even better models of doing things, but raw fourth-tier graduates are not likely to be the former or do the latter.

Law firms no longer hire in increasing class sizes and raise fees every year. As they are now run like businesses, they track every associate's financial contributions to the firm in ways not present under the old model. Your job as an educator should be helping whatever students you have navigate a world where they will not only be attorneys, but also salesmen and debt collectors. If you have a model that you think will train students to excel in this world, by all means, continue it. But under no circumstances is it ethical or moral of you to charge tuition as if the old model were still in place at large firms and 90% of your students had hopes at attorney work. They don't.

McGreal plans to assess . . . ways to keep tuition affordable. Fundraising will be a key aspect of his new job. "We have to think about ways we can address the increasing cost of law school," he said.

Considering that most law schools are highly profitable cash cows for their larger universities, how about you start by slashing tuition across the board and lowering salaries in line with the reality that there is an oversupply of attorneys able to teach at your law school?

Just a simple suggestion, but maybe it's not "entrepreneurial" enough for Dean McGreal.

"Desperation" In Las Vegas; Disparities at UNLV

Those new graduates putting faith in leaving a saturated urban market like Chicago, NYC, or DC for places with less lawyer coverage should know that your peers have already beat you to it, and in droves. Check out what's going on in Nevada. Nevada is seen by some as "a magnet for young attorneys seeking their fortunes" because there is only one law school in what has been a rapidly-growing state over the last decade. But then there's this:

Alex Fugazzi, the attorney handling hiring for the Las Vegas Snell & Wilmer law office, is deluged with applications these days. He suspects desperation when Ivy League grads start filling his e-mail inbox and postal mail slot with résumés.

"I get résumés from Harvard, from Ivy League schools, and we get résumés from 'white shoe' (long-established) law firms in New York and Chicago, from lawyers who used to be able to write their own tickets," he listed.

Do you think they all had bad grades and poor networking abilities?

And that one law school in Nevada, the Boyd School of Law at UNLV, isn't giving rosy prospects, either.

Applications at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas' William S. Boyd School of Law have increased steadily over the last three years, even during the worst of the economic recession, said John Valery White, the law school's dean....He expects to be able to place at least 70 percent of the 2010 Boyd Law School graduates.

While 70 percent may sound lofty in such times (and given how placement is going elsewhere, I'd like to see proof of it), remember that this is a school that is very well-positioned in-state. While some graduates from California may shuffle over, if you want to be an attorney in Nevada, UNLV is the place to go. Despite being barely in the top 100 USNWR schools, UNLV has only 16% acceptance rate and a very high yield (44%). By contrast, Fordham accepts 24% of its applicants. Minnesota is at 24%. Virginia is at 25%. Duke is at 23%. (source: lawschoolnubmers). Different application pools to be sure, but that should give you an idea of how UNLV's monopoly on Nevada legal training helps it and its graduates out.

And yet a quarter of the class just will not be placed by the dean's own admission. If they can't do it with a monopoly on new law grads, what chance do others have in more saturated markets?

And as an aside, why does the Boyd-UNLV website not reflect these adjusted employment projections?

• What is the Boyd School of Law’s employment placement rate?
  Our employment rate for 2007 to 2008 was 90.1% after 9 months. For more employment data click [dead link]

If you only project that 70% of your students will be placed in the Class of 2010, shouldn't you disclose that? By leaving the '08 numbers up, aren't you making some kind of assertion that you don't have numbers for 2009 or 2010? And since you obviously do have numbers for those years, isn't it blatant dishonesty to keep the old numbers up?

Thoughts on Lawyer Depression

Because it is a holiday and I am both traveling and lazy, I'm going simply link to Shilling Me Softly, which has an excellent post about lawyer depression and the new documentary A Terrible Melancholy (a wee bit melodramatic, eh?) that seeks to shed light on the fact that one of our more "prestigious" professions is plagued with depression.

I found this line of Kimber Russel's commentary on the matter especially jarring:

[R]ecognizing that lawyers and law students are depressed is not the solution--we need the legal profession to change, period.

Since I'm of the belief that one should actually cure a disease and not just put cosmetics on the collateral symptoms, I'm in full agreement. Post-hoc support groups are not the answer.

I won't pretend to know all of the causes of attorney depression, at least not in this entry, suffice to say that my strong suspicion is that it's the amount of hours "required." It's not just in the law that people who work insanely high amounts of hours - at a desk staring at a screen or dull text, mind you - but the legal field is certainly a recognized forerunner:

"When you have an undefinable product, there is a temptation to measure output in terms of hours," she said...

For partners at big law firms, the simplest way to track the performance of junior lawyers is to see who bills the most hours above and beyond what is officially required...

What we have in the legal profession is both a collective action problem and an unequal bargaining problem. On the individual level, no non-partner attorney has an incentive to limit his own working hours. And on the firm level, firms have no incentive to limit the billing hours of their associates. But in the big picture, the entire legal system would be better in the aggregate if working hours were curtailed (i.e. lower suicides, more happiness, better health, etc.). The bargaining problem is that young associates seem startlingly similar to industrial revolution workers, regardless of the fact that they wear suits instead of blue collars.

Given these problems, we need a centralized body to say something. We need a maximum hours limitation in the legal profession, either from the government or from some association of attorneys (like a labor union, as they've been effective in protecting working conditions...perhaps some sort of association of bar members could do something about it?)

To be up front, I'm normally more of a libertarian economic mindset than most. I think minimum wage laws and rent/housing assistance are poor policy based on misguided economic premises, for example. But maximum working hours limitations are not economic regulations. They're health regulations, plain and simple. One of the (many) things that made Lochner v. New York such a bad decision is that the Supreme Court couldn't grasp this distinction, and even today people misconstrue health regulations (like FDA food testing) as economic restrictions, especially the wackjob libertarians who lump them all together and cry foul because they'd rather have consistent, absolute beliefs than realistic ones. But I digress.

The point is that working long hours causes demonstrable harm. It did to the bakers forced to inhale dust in Lochner and it does to the lawyers today forced by the systems in place to work 70 hours a week and forgo traditional outlets of stress relief.

We need to collectively realize that a lawyer working 8 good hours on a night of good sleep is probably just as effective as a lawyer working 10-11 hours. We need to realize that from a health and welfare standpoint, a lawyer working 12 hours is no better than a lawyer working 8 hours and getting blasted on meth or crack. We need to realize that a normal human being cannot provide genuinely "competent representation" when writing briefs on arcane federal statutes at 4 a.m. just to keep the hope alive to make partner.

After all, how can a modern profession really have dignity when so many of its members are burnt out, depressed wrecks eerily reminiscent of the pawns in Asian sweatshops, at least mentally? Not even a nice Italian suit and a BMW can cover up being a dreary, suicidal human being.

Your Honor, Who Are You Kidding?

I like to look for possible solutions here, ways to restore the stature attorneys once had, but it's hard to do so when the people at the very top of the legal field pyramid are out-of-touch with reality.

I have a lot of respect for Stephen Breyer. I disagree with him on a fundamental point of Constitutional interpretation, but overall I find that his opinions are well-written and backed by sound argument.

But this, to me, is laughable:

Breyer argued the court makes more decisions unanimously than in narrow 5-4 splits, and that media often oversimplify conflicts as left versus right.

“I don’t think it’s political. I don’t think there are politically-based decisions. I don’t think that people are sitting there thinking what’s good for anybody.”

Unless one limits the word "political" to being technically Republican or technically Democrat, these are outright lies. Granted, 85-90% of what the Supreme Court does is non-political, but that's not because the judges don't make politically-based decisions, it's because the decisions before them don't easily ally with recognizable political sides. Yeah, the Supreme Court has a lot of 8-1 or 9-0 opinions. So what?

Would a Republican and a Democrat decide the outcome in Burnham v. Superior Ct differently? Of course not; no one in the political sphere has any opinion on issues of personal jurisdiction. Are Republicans and Democrats going to differ over invalidating an obviously-overbroad infringement on First Amendment rights, as in U.S. v. Stevens? Not really.

But for better or worse (mostly worse), Supreme Court justices often have to make decisions or draw lines in a manner inseparable from the formation of political policy preferences. When one is asked, "what is the scope of government power/personal liberty x?" the answer inevitably coincides with one's own political views. Contrary to Marbury's discussion of leaving to politics to what is political, or our own Chief Justice's analogy to balls and strikes, it is plain as day that the modern Supreme Court is a political body. They may ground their decisions in methods of interpretation, but the fact that mainline political parties now adopt preferred methods of Constitutional interpretation should be all the proof one needs that the very of choosing a method of interpretation is a political act in and of itself.

Legal realist theories have been around for over sixty or seventy years. Nothing that has happened in the mean time has diminished their relevance. It is impossible to read the 4th and 5th-amendment line of cases from the 60s-present without seeing a clear division based on policy preferences. Or gun rights cases, like McDonald v. Chicago. Or the abortion cases. Or the affirmative action cases. Or Citizens United. Or Bush v. Gore, which directly contradicted the stated Constitutional preferences of those in the majority.

Notice how when there's actually a political issue before the court and the nation's major political sects line up on opposite sides, the Court neatly does the same thing? You'd really have to be out to lunch if you think that's just a coincidence based on pre-existing legal philosophies.

And yet Stephen Breyer, Harvard and Oxford graduate, apparently doesn't "think there are politically-based decisions."

My guess is that he said so either for his own psychological sake (i.e., to bring the Court's actions in line with his legal training and beliefs) or because he wanted to protect the Court's integrity to the public (i.e., because courts in general are supposed to be neutral, they should give the appearance of neutrality).

In either event, it's misguided. Blatantly lying - or making continual feeble attempts to lie - damages the integrity of the Court far more than making decisions based on policy preferences. No one seriously equates the Supreme Court with their local trial court, nor should they. The political nature of the former has nothing to do with the integrity of the latter. Most people acknowledge the Supreme Court as a political body and have for quite some time.

This isn't to say there's no difference between law and politics. There undoubtedly is. But upholding that difference is not the same as claiming " I don’t think that people are sitting there thinking what’s good for anybody." They very clearly are, and, like the puppet-masters in the old USSR, denying a self-evident truth brings no dignity to the office or respect from the average citizen.

If we want the law to be a dignified profession, perhaps we should start by being honest.